Nature-Study Sisters: “Among Green Trees” (1902) by Julia Ellen Rogers, and “The Brook Book” (1901) by Mary Rogers Miller

 Backyard Nature, book review, Books, Insects, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place, Spirituality  No Responses »
Feb 032024
 

SISTER ELLEN had never seen the trailing arbutus in its native woods. The rills and brooks near the city had been so greatly “improved” by their contact with civilization that scarcely a leaf remained to suggest the sweetness of the Mayflower. It had retreated before the ever-advancing army of flower pickers with baskets and grasping hands. With it had gone the pinxter- flower, and even the more rugged columbine had been driven to establish itself on the steep sides of the gorges, where no human foot had ever trod...

…one azalea remained in our near-by woods and a chosen few knew its station. It served us for a calendar. When its buds were pink at the points we knew that the north slope of Tower Hill would be covered with arbutus and the south side with pink azaleas. With baskets and small black pail we started, Sister Ellen, the Doctor and I.

We followed the course of the stream, making our own path as we went. Ellen pounced upon the first promising bit of green which showed under the carpet of dead leaves. It proved to be a small plant of arbutus too young to have a blossom. “Wait till we get farther down,” I advised knowingly.

We were coming to the arbutus country, by the signs which we who had been there aforetime recognized. Soon now the patient scrapings of Sister Ellen would be rewarded. We must keep near her and catch the glow of her first “fine frenzy.” For the twentieth time she dropped to her knees among the dead _ leaves. This time was her reward. There lay the most exquisite clusters, like pink ivory, delicately wrought. The faint elusive perfume enslaved us all. Down on your knees and offer homage to this woodland princess!

The turn of the century (from the 19th into the 20th) marked the apex of the Nature-Study Movement. Its purpose and principles are worthy of many blog posts if not a book or two. Inspired in part by Liberty Hyde Bailey, professor of horticulture at Cornell University, Nature-study was an approach to teaching children about the natural world through direct observation and guided inquiry. Led by an inquisitive teacher (who was likely far from being a nature expert herself), children would ramble out-of-doors, find a particular thing of interest (insect, plant, stream, etc.), and study it closely. They might be asked to sketch the object, and/or come up with different questions to ask about it. The intention was far less to teach natural history content than it was to guide children into a greater appreciation and wonder about the everyday natural landscape all around them (whether in rural places or cities). Other figures in the New York State branch of Nature-study education (there was another that emerged in Chicago) included author/educator Anna Botsford Comstock (who wrote The Handbook of Nature Study, still in print) and her husband, the entomologist and author John Henry Comstock, to whom The Brook Book was dedicated. (Comstock is “the Doctor” in the passage above.) Mentored by Bailey and the Comstocks, sisters Mary Rogers Miller (1868-1971) and Julia Ellen Rogers (1866-1958) pursued careers in Nature-study, first in Ithaca, New York, and later in Long Beach and Los Angeles, California, respectively. Early in their careers, while still in Upstate New York, they both authored nature books of their own. Encouraged by Liberty Hyde Bailey, Julia Ellen wrote a general book on trees, covering their structure, propagation, and care, along with a guide to the most common trees of the Northeast. Mary, inspired by John Comstock, wrote a book on streams with an emphasis on aquatic life, especially insects. Julia Ellen does not mention her sister, but Mary refers to “Sister Ellen” in several places, including the text above, which tells the story of Julia Ellen’s first encounter with blooming arbutus.

At first, I found The Brook Book a puzzling read. It consists of a series of vignettes chronicling nature expeditions, arranged seasonally to begin with spring and end with wintertime. But while her sister devoted several pages to explaining the design and rationale behind Among Green Trees, Mary explained the purpose behind her own book in much simpler terms: “Throughout a year a brook is captivating. It is as companionable as a child, and as changeful. It hints at mysteries. But does it tell secrets other than its own? Does it tell where the wild things come down to drink? Does it tell where the birds take their baths, or where the choice wild flowers lurk? I fain would know the story of its playfellows and dependents.” Between the lines of this playful, teasing account is some hint, perhaps, of her audience might be — the child within all of us, old and young alike.

That said, the first several dozen pages favored the young. I enjoyed the writing, but learned nothing new and encountered little of note. Then I came upon a chapter about how spiders spin their webs. Mary quoted briefly from a nature guidebook that explained how orb weavers begin constructing their webs by spinning a series of guy lines, using dry and rigid thread so that they can support the entire structure while being easy for the spider to traverse readily. Only then does the spider spin its web of sticky and elastic threads — not in concentric circles, but instead a continuous spiral. She then set out to find an orb web herself and see how it was built. Indeed, her own observations matched what she head read. But reading it alone was not enough. For my own part, reading her book almost 125 years after it was written, I confess that I had never stopped to think about how spiders build their webs. Somewhere along the line, I just assumed the webs consisted of a series of concentric circles, not single spirals. There was how it was done — hiding all this time in plain sight, in a web on the railing of a bridge over a brook. “After seeing all these things happen,” Mary observed, “we know the philosophy of the two kinds of threads, but the wonder of it is still with us.” And that wonder is the the ultimate prize of the Nature-study enthusiast. The book contains other intriguing discoveries, including a hypothesized “cow shed”, a “curious, muddy-looking” object on the stem of a shrub that John Comstock claims was built by ants to house a herd of aphids. (The aphidse secret a sugary substance that the ants feed on, receiving in exchange protection from would-be insect predators.) I admit to being skeptical regarding that one.

One of my favorite passages in the book, though, is a stern critique of a neighbor’s utilitarian outlook on the value of nature — an anthropromorphic one that, I fear, matches that of many Americans today:

…we are told that both the back-swimmer and the waterboatman grow, as do other insects of their order, by successive molts or changes of skin. They reach maturity, if they escape their enemies, and spend the winter at the bottom, as did their parents.

After enthusiastically describing these business-like little creatures to a neighbor one day, even persuading her to go with me and watch them in Meadow Brook, I was chilled and fairly disgusted at her question: “What are they good for?”

How could I answer her? Of the added joy of existence which they had given to me, I hadn’t the heart to speak. Her question told me that no such “foolishness” would appeal to her. Neither could I make her understand that, so far as I was concerned, no utility need be assigned to any creature as an excuse for its presence among us. As well ask: “What use, to them, are we?” But I saw she expected me to speak up in defense of these denizens of Meadow Brook, and so I said: “Oh, food for fish!”—a lame response and totally unfounded on personal observation. A conciliatory “Umph!” assured me that my reply was entirely satisfactory, as there could be no question in any one’s mind as to the use of fish.

…that intelligent grown people should demand a reason for the existence of every other creature is nearly unforgivable. May the time soon come when the silly superstitions about animals and plants will cease to be visited upon the third and fourth generation, and supplanted by personal knowledge of nature. Man will become more tolerant of other creatures and less sure, perhaps, of his own exalted position in the universe. Let us hope that he will then see himself as others see him and begin to learn to love his neighbor as himself.

A hearty “Amen” to that, Mary! I also found myself nodding in agreement at the high value she placed on ferns — much in keeping with the Victorian fascination for them: “Who ever had enough of ferns? They are always the right thing in the right place.” I will close my account of The Brook Book with this charming passage extolling the joys of a winter nature walk:

I shall never again allow myself to be mewed up between walls of brick and mortar for any length of time. The arching tree-tops are temples which call to worship. Their voices and the murmur of the ice-rimmed stream mingle like soft music from a far-off organ. I will go often, and be lifted out of the humdrum of every-day existence. The outdoor world is full of life in winter. To know this life one needs only to be open-eyed and open-hearted; the spirit of winter is ever ready to guide, to cheer and to bless.

Among Green Trees offered quite a contrast. Julia explained that she had crafted an “all-around tree book” offering no less than four different points of view: the Nature-study side; the physiological side; the practical side; and the systematic side”. Ellen herself clearly favored the nature-study side, and I would have to concur. The portions of the book covering the wonders of buds, branches, and bark were by far the most fascinating. Indeed, once the book transitioned into chapters on planting and caring for trees (including when and how to spray them with various toxic chemicals) I lost interest. I considered reading the detailed accounts of different trees (systematic side), but opted to be satisfied with having read on the the first half of the book (though, given the oversized pages and modest font, that was still considerable text).

Although Julia comes across as a bit more sophisticated and professional in tone, she comes alive when speaking about her true passion, Nature-study. “Nature-study,” she announces, “is a keen, appreciative study of the common things around us. It means accurate seeing and clear thinking. Nature-study is the most vital idea today in education. It is studying things instead of studying about things. Under it, the commonplace becomes transfigured.” It is intriguing to note that her choice of “transfigured” echoes the religious tone of her sister’s description of tree-tops as “temples which call to worship.” There is a spiritual, transformational facet to Nature-study, one that is largely neglected (or outright avoided) in environmental education programs nowadays.

Lest we get too serious, Julie also reminds her readers of the joy that can be found learning from nature. In a chapter on how leaves are arranged on branches, she observes that “Leaf-arrangement is intensely interesting, when we come to study it. The botanists try to scare the common folks away by calling it Phyllobotany. But they can’t keep the fun all to themselves. Let us get into their pleasant game.“

IJulia clearly loved trees, and went out of her way to describe them as akin to human beings. Indeed, the subtitle of her book is “A Guide to Pleasant and Profitable Acquaintance with Familar Trees“. Early on in the work, she observes that “Trees speak a language, if only we have the patience to learn it. It’s a sign language, and through it they tell us all manner of interesting things about how they make their living — about their hopes and their disappointments.” A bit later in the book, in a chapter called The Sleep of Trees, she declares that “Trees are, after all, very much like folks! …In winter, trees put on their warmest coats — a fashion set by the woodchuck and the bear — and just sleep and wait for spring! In warm weather a tree goes to sleep at sundown, and wakes up in the morning. If the sky is overcast, the tree is drowsy; if rain sets in, it goes right off to sleep.” One reviewer felt compelled to remark on the “many unscientific and misleading statements” in the book, particularly her lines about trees sleeping: “We suppose that this is a reference to the photosynthetic process, but to the uninitiated this would convey the idea that the tree is actually drowsy in the same sense that animals are.” Ironically, recent research on plants has revealed that they “behave” in particular ways and even have an innate, though highly distributed, “intelligence”.

Reading books that are 100 years old or more, I sometimes find myself a bit jarred by having passed into a long-gone world. In the case of Among Green Trees, this experience took the form of images and passages concerning elm trees. Thanks to the ravages of Dutch elm disease, it has been more than 50 years now since any elms could be found in backyards and along city streets. Julia opens her book with a lengthy quote from an 1841 article by Nathaniel Peabody Rogers (her abolitionist grandfather), part of which celebrates the elm:

And the elm — the patriarch of the family of shade, the majestic, the umbrageous, the antlered elm! We remember one at this moment — in sight from our own home on the banks of the Pemigewassett. It stood just across that cold stream, by the roadside, on the margin of the wide intervale. It stood upon the ground as lightly as though “it rose in dance,” its full top bending over toward the ground on every side with the dignity of the forest tree, and all the grace of the weeping willow. You could gaze upon it for hours. It was the beautify handy-work and architecture of God, on which the eye of man never tires, but always looks with refreshing and delight.

Julia herself extolled the glories of a New England village lined with elms:

Especially impressive to me was the little village whose main street forms the frontispiece of this volume. It is hardly what you would eall a populous village. There is just this one long avenue, with a few little feints at cross streets; no railroad, no factory, no noise, no bustle—just the quiet industries of a village whose commerce is with the thrifty farmer folk round about. It is not a village you could duplicate in the west, for the houses are century old, solidly built, and mostly innocent of paint. There are lilacs, purple and white, leaning up against the houses, and quaint, old-fashioned gardens shut in behind low picket fences.

The glory of the old place is its double row of superb American elms, which arch above the long street, intermingling their tops, and making of it a shadowy aisle with vaulted arches, like some vast cathedral. Long ago the villagers dug little trees im the neighboring woods and lined the road on both sides with them. Then they let them alone! Violets and ferns came with them from the woods, and spread undisturbed in their new environment. To-day they may still be seen among the gnarled roots of the patriarchal trees, springing out here and there as they have been doing for a hundred years.

Alas, the elms are long gone now, relics of another age.

Six Visits with Five Old Friends: C.C. Abbott, James Buckham, Walter Prichard Eaton, Ernest Ingersoll, and Bradford Torrey

 Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Insects, Native Plants, Natural History  No Responses »
Dec 282023
 

In this blog post, I am playing a bit of a catch-up, writing about six different books I have read recently by five forgotten nature writers, all of whom have previously appeared in this blog, and at least three of whom will likely return in the future. C.C. Abbott (1843-1919; left, above) was an amateur naturalist and archaeologist, who lived outside Trenton, New Jersey, and wrote mostly about the natural history of his marshland property and adjacent lands. Though quoted by many at the time (and participant in a heated debate about early human presence in America, which he argued pre-dated the last Ice Age), is known today only as the figure for whom Abbott Marshlands Park was named. James Buckham (1858-1908; no photo found), was a journalist and writer who lived in Melrose, Massachusetts. He does not currently have so much as a Wikipedia entry. Walter Prichard Eaton (1878-1957; right, above) was a theater critic and writer; for at least the last ten years of his life, he wintered in North Carolina and summered at his home in the Berkshires. He has a brief Wikipedia entry and a slightly longer New York Times obituary (courtesy the Way Back Machine). Ernest Ingersoll (1852-1946; not pictured above) was a naturalist and explorer of the West (including the Hayden Geological Survey of Colorado in 1873) and an early advocate for conservation. Born in Monroe, Michigan, Ingersoll spent most of his life in New York City. Finally, Bradford Torrey (1843-1912; middle, above) was a nature writer and ornithologist, whose books of nature rambles with birding and botanizing were quite popular during his lifetime. Torrey is essentially forgotten today; even the Torreya Pine (whose wild habitat is limited to a small park in the Florida panhandle) was named for a distant relative, not for him. Born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, he spent most of his life in Boston before moving out to Santa Barbara, California where he spent his final years.

What all of these books have in common is that they were enjoyable but, for the most part, not particularly noteworthy. I have yet to read many writers from my chosen time period whose prose is abjectly painful to ingest (apart, perhaps, for some moments with Flagg — and yes, I will be returning to him eventually, too). All of these books were pleasant, and Eaton’s even had some dramatic scenes. But on the whole, reading these six titles was more about encountering old friends than making dramatic discoveries. I will begin my account with Torrey. I read two of his books recently: A Florida Sketch-Book (1894) and Footing It in Franconia (1901). Before I begin to share about each, I will briefly mention the provenance of my copies, both of which were likely first editions. Footing it in Franconia (upper left photo) bears a bookplate of Herbert S. Ardell. Herbert Stacy Ardell was born in 1878 and as of 1897, he lived at 221 Dean Street in Brooklyn. In 1895, he published “Among the Sioux Indians with a Camera” for Peterson Magazine. A Florida Sketch-Book was previously in the collections of Oxford Memorial Library in Oxford, New York; the book label shows a structure that matches well with the current library building.

On to my review of these two volumes. A Florida Sketch-Book was, well, rather a disappointment. Like Blatchley a few years later, Torrey approached Jacksonville by rail and spent his vacation in the northern portion of the state, mostly inland apart from some time around Daytona Beach. Ultimately, I think Torrey simply found the flat Florida landscape less enticing than, say, New Hampshire or even most of Massachusetts. Here is how he compared the Florida pine forest to his native woodlands of New England:

“Whether I followed the railway,—in many respects a pretty satisfactory method,—or some roundabout, aimless carriage road, a mile or two was generally enough. The country offers no temptation to pedestrian feats, nor does the imagination find its account in going farther and farther. For the reader is not to think of the flat-woods as in the least resembling a Northern forest, which at every turn opens before the visitor and beckons him forward. Beyond and behind, and on either side, the pine-woods are ever the same. It is this monotony, by the bye, this utter absence of landmarks, that makes it so unsafe for the stranger to wander far from the beaten track. The sand is deep, the sun is hot; one place is as good as another.”

Perhaps he saw literary merit in writing a book whose structure and quality generally mirrored the landscape he was writing about. Whether intended or not, his description of exploring the flat-woods matches my experience reading his book. There were a lot of birds seen and described (mostly woodland songbirds) and various encounters with natives whose conversational exchanges with Torrey fill intervening pages. But unlike Blatchley’s book, Torrey’s failed to transport me to north Florida. I closed the volume with little gained from the journey. Having read several other volumes he has written (and with a few more to go), I would say that he is capable of delightful, insightful prose, but not here.

Footing It in Franconia, on the other hand, was a much more delightful book. Here he trods far more familiar ground, in and around the Franconia Mountains of New Hampshire. Here, he shares his observations and reflections from a boat on Lonesome Lake on an autumn day:

“The lake is like a mirror, and I sit in the boat with the sun on my back (as comfortable as a butterfly), listening and looking. What else can I do? I have puUed out far enough to bring the top of Lafayette [Mountain] into view above the trees, and have put down the oars. The birds are mostly invisible. Chickadees can be heard talking among themselves, a flicker calls wicker, wicker, whatever that means, and once a kingfisher springs his rattle. Red squirrels seem to be ubiquitous, full of sauciness and chatter. How very often their clocks need winding! A few big dragon-flies are still shooting over the water. But the best thing of all is the place itself: the solitude, the brooding sky (the lake’s own, it seems to be), the solemn mountain top, the encircling forest, the musical woodsy stillness. The rowan trees were never so bright with berries. Here and there one still holds fidl of green leaves, with the ripe red clusters shining everywhere among them.

Here, the impatient, frustrated voice of Torrey in Florida is replaced by a more patient and contemplative one. Pausing to appreciate the landscape, Torrey draws the reader into it. Oh — and ironically, he also shares briefly about his visit to a Torreya Pine while in Florida years earlier. The memory emerges after sharing about a female entomologist he met during his travels:

“It was worth something to see a first-rate, thoroughly equipped ” insectarian ” at work and to hear her talk. I shoidd have been proud even to hold one of her smaller phials, but they were all adjusted beyond the need, or even the comfortable possibility, of such assistance. There was nothing for it but to play the looker-on and listener. In that part I hope I was less of a failure.

How many species already bear her name she has never told me. I suspect they are so numerous and so frequent that she herself can hardly keep track of them. Think of the pleasure of walking about the earth and being able to say, as an insect chirps, ” Listen ! that is one of my species, — named after me, you know.” Such specific honors, I say, are common in her case, — common almost to satiety. But to have a genus named for her, — that was glory of a different rank, glory that can never fall to the same person but once ; for generic names are unique. Once given, they are patented, as it were. They can never be used again — for genera, that is — in any branch of natural science. To our Franconia entomologist this honor came, by what seemed a poetic justice, in the Lepidoptera, the order in which she began her researches. Hers is a genus of moths. I trust they are not of the kind that ” corrupt.”

…sometimes, the lady will turn to me. “It is too bad you can never have a genus,” she will say in her bantering tone “the name is already taken up, you know.”

“Yes, indeed, I know it,” I answer her. An older member of the family, a — th cousin, carried off the prize many years ago, and the rest of us are left to get on as best we can, without the hope of such dignities. When I was in Florida I took pains to see the tree, — the family evergreen, we may call it. Though it is said to have an ill smell, it is handsome, and we count it an honor.

And there we leave the matter. Let the shoemaker stick to his last. Some of us were not bom to shine at badinage, or as collectors of beetles. For myself, in this bright September weather I have no ambitions. It is enough, I think, to be a follower of the road, breathing the breath of life and seeing the beauty of the world.”

Here I cannot help but compare Torrey’s desire to be a “follower of the road” to Blatchley’s desire to be a generalist naturalist and find joy in the moment. Both of them let go of visions of fame within a particular discipline, in favor of following their bliss. And both, interestingly enough, take a moment to contemplate the nature of death as a return to the whole of the cosmos. Here, Torrey reflects more positively on that transition, while on a birding outing to Mount Agassiz:

“Now and then, as I listen, I seem to hear a voice saying, ” Blessed are the dead.” I foretaste a something better than this separate, contracted, individual state of being which we call life, and to which in ordinary moods we cling so fondly. To drop back into the Universal, to lose life in order to find it, this would be heaven; and for the moment, with this musical woodsy silence in my ears, I am almost there. Yet it must be that I express myself awkwardly, for I am never so much a lover of earth as at such a moment. Life is good. I feel it so now. Fair are the white birch stems; fair are the gray-green poplars. This is my third day, and my spirit is getting in tune.”

Onward to the next volume: Clear Skies & Cloudy by C. C.Abbott (1898). Easily the most elegant book of the lot, it has not only a stunning cover (above left) but lovely old photographs (unlike many other Abbott titles, which can include engravings but may not have any illustrations at all). Poaetquissings (above right) is a stream that flows through Abbott’s property named Three Beaches just south of Trenton, New Jersey. My copy of this book bears no marks of prior ownership and is in marvelous condition.

After two books of travel adventures from Torrey, Abbott offers an exploration of discoveries in his home place, defending that perspective with the observation that “The ever-present possibility of novelty is an incentive that should prove all-powerful, and nowhere is the world so worn out that the unexpected may not happen.” He further declares that “The best of what is out of doors is not always at arm’s length. Healthy enthusiasm is a rational phase of the spirit of adventure, but adventure does not necessarily mean distance, be it understood.” As Thoreau once remarked, “I have traveled a good deal in Concord.” Of course, it helps when one’s home place extends over many dozens of acres…

Making discoveries close to home can be a bit easier, too, when one is equipped with a Claude Lorraine Glass (also known as simply a Claude Glass), which I first encountered on page 68 of this book. A small black slightly concave mirror, it enabled the viewer to get a wider perspective of the landscape by bringing disparate elements closer together, while also showing more clearly the outlines of clouds. It is a largely forgotten tool that was widely used in the 1700s and 1800s by artists and travelers alike.

Here is one of my favorite passages from this book, on the art of listening to nature and the challenge of identifying the meaning behind sounds encountered in the woods:

“There is no such thing as a meaningless sound. It is a contradiction to speak of what we hear as having no significance, but the meaning of any sound may or may not be of importance to us. …To simply hear a sound is not all. To listen, to realize the full intent and purpose of every variation in the sound, to note the accompanying gesture with each characteristic utterance, whenever possible; in short, to appreciate the effort on an animal’s or bird’s part to interpret its own feelings, this is to listen intelligently, and in so doing to be taught a useful lesson in ornithology. There is profit, then, as well as pleasure in being abroad on a bright April morning like this, and noting, whether we stroll along the footpath way or stand by some one of the old oaks, whatsoever is to be heard on the hill-side.”

At a couple of points in his book, Abbott referred to the dramatic decline in bird numbers he had observed over the past few decades. Peregrine falcons and bald eagles had become rare, and even herons were much less common. “Time was when there were herons and heronries and stately white egrets along the river-shore, and the creeks teemed with wild fowl in season. It is a cause to be thankful, to-day, that the heron, a single heron, has given to this dismal day the charm of its presence….” At one point during a forest outing, Abbott noted sadly that

“It is hard to realize that time was when on this very spot there were birds by the thousands, and now often half a day goes by and not even one poor sparrow to make glad the fields. Many birds passed away with the trees, but not all. Birds have wit enough to accommodate themselves to very changed conditions, and would do so, but man will not permit. …Now, when it is almost, if not quite too late, an earnest cry is going up to spare the birds; but are not the fools too many and the wise too few to restor our one-time blessing? Spare what are left by all means, but what of those that are gone forever?”

Lest I leave the reader dispairing, I have to add here that not all moments in this book are as serious and dark as the one following the passage above, in which Abbott imagines a millstone he has found not as a testament to human progress, but a tombstone to all of nature that has been lost (p. 200). There is also this more whimsical moment, in which Abbott makes his way through a dense thicket in the woods, seeing the experience as an excellent cure for a naturalist’s boredom:

“…a wilderness of weeds of a single summer’s growth will well repay most careful exploration. It can offer stout resistance to your progress, and what may not hyssop and boneset and iron-weed and dudder conceal ? Your legs and arms held fast by the Gordian knot of greenbrier, you magnify, when helpless, every unexplained condition, and a foot-long garter-snake will give you a passing vision of a boa-constrictor, and mice will grow to wild-cats, before you see them scampering across your feet. If you would rid the day of possible monotony, push through a pathless thicket in the corner of some neglected field ; get scratched and pricked, and warmed by the effort, if not excitement, and believe ever after that the well-known country, as you thought it, is not so well known after all. Too seldom do we leave the beaten path and leap over the farmers’ fences.”

I will keep this little trick in mind the next outing in which I feel bored — as long as ticks and chiggers aren’t in season, at least.

My next book, Afield with the Seasons (1907) is by James Buckham (1858-1908). My copy bears an inscription to Claire Whitman Hathaway in Boston from [name not legible] on November 5th, 1932. I could not figure out Claire.  There was a Claire May Whitman Hathaway who was born in Maine and died there 75 years later, in 1940. If she was given this book, she would have had to be living in Massachusetts at that time.

Buckham’s writing is poetic, evocative, and sensorially rich. Here is an example:

“While the March trumpets are blowing, and the March sun is shining, there is a keen delight in skirting the ice edge of the woods. All the wild life within seems to come out on that sheltered side, especially in the early afternoon. Here, too, the earliest wild-flowers peep out, and the pasture or meadow grass first begins to grow green.

Perhaps you may walk in the shelter of the woods for miles in a sun-glow that sets you tingling; and while you hear the wind roaring overhead, lashing the woods and blowing the clouds against the sky, you might almost carry a lighted candle in your hand under that lee shelter, without seeing it extinguished.”

In this passage, Buckham makes a metaphorical link between cow paths and human dreams which I find rather intriguing:

“As the rambler strolls homeward along the old lane, he notes the many cow-paths that seam and furrow it, winding hither and thither, irrespective of parallels or of one another, approaching and then receding, like those plotted curves by which the modern psychologists represent the unconscious action of the human brain in dreams. Some of the paths are worn deep as ditches, with even deeper hoof-printed hollows in them, where the habit-forming cows have stepped for generations.”

While Buckham brings some basic scientific knowledge into his writing, ultimately he eschews it in favor of a deeper kind of knowing, the kind he describes in his last essay in the book as having characterized the American Indians:

“…we must not seek too strenuously for scientific explanations of the sounds in nature, if we would retain their mystical and poetic charm. I would rather not know exactly what makes the ice-bound lake whoop in the winter. The Indian knew the phenomenon best, because he knew least about it. I wish it were possible for us to still know many things in nature as the Indian knew them — mystically, feelingly, poetically, that is, instead of scientifically and materially.”

I am reminded once again of the challenge Burroughs posed for all nature writers: to maintain a sensibility at once both scientific and poetic. Reading over dozens of authors between 1850 and 1930, I am struck by the myriad ways in which they nearly all endeavor to do that, from deep pantheism and magic realism on one end to juxtaposed scientific description and poetry fragments on the other. In his longing to weave the two into his lived experience, Buckham reminds me considerably of Winthrop Packard.     

The fifth book and fourth author is Skyline Camps by Walter Prichard Eaton (1922). In addition to writing books about nature around his home in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, Eaton also published this account of adventures out west, in newly established National Parks and Forests. He traveled with many others, adventuring in the wilderness on horseback and foot. Many chapters in this book concern adventures in Oregon (possibly on a single trip there), including exploring Glacier National Park, Crater Lake National Park, and the Northern Cascade Mountains, including an attempted ascent of snow-blanketed Mount Jefferson. His writing is effective and engaging if unspectacular. A wealthy Easterner by background, his exploits always involve a cast of many others, including a cook. He describes the landscape he experiences, identifying some of the birds and plants along the way. In places, he includes scientific names for the plants, though he rarely does more than name and briefly describe what he sees. I enjoyed the book and was glad I had read it, but I reached the end without encountering a single passage worth sharing here. I am finding that travel nature books can be a mixed bag. For those who dig in deep and intensely engage with a new place (such as Blatchley in Florida), the result can be fascinating. For other writers, just passing through and seeing what they can along the way (like Torrey in Florida and Eaton in Oregon), the result does not have the power of nature writing by authors who have inhabited and rambled through in their natural places for many years. Here I am thinking of Burroughs in the Catskills, Muir in the Sierras, Mills in the Rockies, and Abbott along the Delaware.

My last, and latest, visit was with Ernest Ingersoll’s Nature’s Calendar (1900). Above left is an image of the lovely dragonfly cover (in the case of my copy, looking a bit bedraggled), while a portrait of Ingersoll is above right. In the middle, you can get a sense of the book’s layout. Each page includes extensive white space in the margins, both beside and below the text. “…regard the printed part as nothing more than my beginning,“, Ingersoll explains to the reader, “and…complete it and correct it for your own locality in the blank spaces left to you for that purpose.” The reader is tasked with recording what they observe, given Ingersoll’s definition of observation as “the faculty of keeping open at the same time both the eyes and the mind.” Of course, to get the reader to do that requires overcoming hesitation amongst those uncomfortable with writing in their books. So Ingersoll does his best to encourage the reader further, noting that “It is well known to book-lovers and to the collectors of rare volumes that the value of an old book is enhanced in most cases when its margins show annotations by the owner; and that such books more often than others are kept as precious heirlooms…” Mary Bradley Allen, who received this book on September 17th, 1900 according to the flyleaf, never recorded anything else in the book, however, despite Ingersoll’s entreaties. 

The book gets off to a slow start, though starting in January, when so much of nature is hidden or asleep, makes this somewhat expected. Throughout the volume, Ingersoll relied heavily on the observations of others, including Thoreau, Burroughs, Abbott, Cram, Packard, Wright, Allen, Merriam, Flagg, and others. The text itself points out what may be experienced each month, assuming one is in southern New England or thereabouts. As the work continues, the prose seems to become a bit less wooden (perhaps I got used to it over time?), and Ingersoll offers helpful guidance to the novice naturalist. In the text for May, for example, he provides some basic recommendations for the would-be birder, beginning with the idea that birds ought to be approached quietly to avoid scaring them away. His birding advice includes this caveat:

“Few windows open so pleasantly into the temple of nature as that through which we look when we study the grace and beauty of birds. We should fall short of the highest advantage, however, if we learned merely to recognize the birds apart, and failed to get some idea of the larger world of which they are but one delightful feature.”

What new realization, ultimately, would tyro naturalists stand to gain by making their way through the year with Ingersoll as a guide? As he closed out the volume, he offered this parting prospect in a somewhat comma-tose fashion:

“We have now followed the circle of year round to its calendar, beginning in January. and have found that it all moves together, the revival of vegetation under the spring sun being the signal for the awakening of animal life and the renewal of its energies, and its progress from leaf to flower, and then to fruit, being accompanied by the development of the various creatures that depend upon it for food. Each year is a grand illustration of the interdependence of all nature; of the exact adjustment of each creature to the other creatures of its locality and to their surroundings, and of the uniformity of law.”

Before Me the Atlantic Stretches Eastward: “A Nature Wooing at Ormond by the Sea” by W. S. Blatchley (1902), part two

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Dec 262023
 

“In the afternoon a strong, cold wind blows from the west. I cross the river and the peninsula beyond to the ocean’s beach. Before me the Atlantic stretches eastward, blue and unbroken to the shores of Africa. The wind blows off shore, and except for the sight and roar of the surf I would not know the ea was there. No odor of salt water, no sign of seaweed greets me. The beach is a hard, unbroken mass of reddish yellow sand, with only here and there the valve of a sea shell or the body of a giant sea squid to break its monotony. Not a pebble, not a sign of fish, not a rock for the waves to dash upon ; how different from the beach of the same ocean along New England’s rock-bound coast! A solitary steamer of small size, southward bound, about half a mile from shore, is the only vessel in sight. After an hour the whole scene becomes monotonous in the extreme and, on account of the sharp wind which catches up and carries outward clouds of sand from the inner edge of the beach, very disagreeable.”

Told by his doctor that he should take a vacation in the south to recover from “nervous prostration”, Willis Blatchley (1859-1940) journeyed south by train to Ormond by the Sea (now part of the City of Ormond Beach) in March of 1899. He chronicles his time in Florida (and his midlife crisis — see my previous post on this book) in A Nature Wooing at Ormond by the Sea. (Yes, that is one of the oddest titles of a natural history book I have encountered in my research thus far.). But for those picturing a Florida vacation as days on the beach and nights in fine restaurants and resort hotels, Blatchley managed nearly completely to avoid it all. One of his rare beach outings, reported above, was a disaster. He visited a different beach later in his vacation but was most taken with the wreck of a ship that had recently washed ashore, and spent very little time observing the waves or even the seabirds.

Instead, for Blatchley, vacation was an opportunity to continue the life he loved in Indiana, but in a warmer, more humid, more biodiverse setting: observe wildlife, particularly small organisms. Mostly, he turned over many logs and reported on what he saw (making A Nature Wooing a logbook of sorts). He did a bit of botanizing, a modicum of birdwatching, and a fair bit of observing of critters in shells (or just the empty shells). He spent a few days poking about in a local shell midden, Ormond Mound (now known as the Timucua Indian Burial Mound). And for all his casual rambling, Blatchley even managed to make important discoveries for science and archaeology. First, he observed a belly-up horseshoe crab right itself (something renowned naturalist Thomas Say had claimed was not possible). Then, while excavating the lowermost level of Ormond Mound, he discovered the humerus bone of a Great Auk! The discovery was reported in the newspapers in the spring of 1902; Prof. C. H. Hitchcock, of Dartmouth College, was in Ormond at the time, and immediately began an excavation of his own, unearthing a second Great Auk bone — another left humerus, indicating that at least two birds had been caught (and presumably eaten) there. According to the Florida Museum, these bones date back only about a thousand years, indicating that Great Auks likely wintered along the Atlantic coast of Florida during the Little Ice Age. Presumably, they migrated seasonally from their northern nesting grounds. That would have been quite a journey, given that they had lost the ability to fly and would have had to swim the entire way.

I admit to being astonished at how Great Auks were present in Florida just a few hundred years before they went extinct. According to Blatchley, another extinct bird may still have been living in the northern part of Florida in 1899, too. According to a couple of local fieldworkers, Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers still inhabited heavily timbered hammocks (uplands) in the region, while the Carolina Parakeet had been seen around Ormond as recently as 1887. Both, Blatchley noted, had once been common in Indiana but had long since vanished from the state.

Where Blatchley’s work particularly shines (apart from the midlife crisis angle I explored in a previous post) is in his thorough documentation of the biodiversity of a corner of Florida that has since succumbed to dramatic sprawl. At the time of Blatchley’s visit in 1899, Ormond had only 600 residents; now, greater Ormond Beach is home to over 43,000 people. Some of what Blatchley saw has been preserved, fortunately. The “old Spanish chimneys” that were a popular tourist destination in 1899 have been preserved (and partially restored) as Dummett Sugar Mill Ruins (although Blatchley was much mistaken about their age — supposedly over two hundred years old at the time and of Spanish origin, they had actually been constructed by a British entrepreneur only 75 years earlier). Part of the Tomoka River that Blatchley explored also remains relatively untouched, in Tomoka State Park. In addition to detailed descriptions and drawings of many of his animal finds (especially insects), Blatchley’s book also includes a list of all the insects he identified in the Ormond area. It would be a fascinating research project (M.S., anyone) to return to the region and see how many of them can still be found there today.

Finally, a promised few words of biography. Alas, for all the books he wrote and travels he undertook, he is little known today. There is a nature club in Indiana that bears his name, but there is no direct connection beyond the club founder thinking highly of Blatchley. He moved from Connecticut to Indiana at the age of one and never left the state. For many years he headed the Science Department at Terre Haute High School. He also served as State Geologist for 16 years. He married Clara Fordyce (or Fordice?) in 1882, and they had two sons. After a couple of visits to Florida (including the one chronicled here), he purchased land in Dunedin, near Tampa, and had a winter residence built. He visited there regularly, and one of his nature books chronicles his nature observations from a tree on his property. His journeys took him to Mexico, Alaska, and South America (the last trip being the topic of his final published work). He died in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1940 at the age of 80. He is most famous today for his contributions to entomology. None of his books was ever reprinted, with the exception of a small commemorative run of his book set in Dunedin, My Nature Nook, courtesy of the Dunedin Historical Society.

A Rune of the Ancient Earth: “Woodland Paths” by Winthrop Packard (1910)

 Birds, book review, Books, Insects, Native Plants, Sense of Place  1 Response »
Aug 122023
 

The April showers touch with caressing fingers the chords of all things and bring music from them, each according to its kind. In the open forest under deciduous trees the dead leaves thrummed a ghostly dirge like that of the “Dead March in Saul.” Winter ghosts marched to it in solemn procession out of the woodland. Memories of sleet and deep snow, ice storm, and heartbreaking frost, tramped soggily in sullen procession over the misty ridge and on northward toward the barren lands to the north of Hudson’s Bay. Thrilling through this solemn march below I heard the laughing fantasia of young drops upon bourgeoning twigs above, dirge and ditty softening in distance to a mystic music, a rune of the ancient earth.

In the open pasture the tune changed again. It was there a chirpy crepitation that presaged all the tiny, cheerful insects whose songs will make May nights merry. These, no doubt, take their first music lessons from the patter of belated April showers on the grass roofs of their homes. But it was down on the pond margin that I found the most perfect music. Slender mists danced to it, fluttering softly up from the margin, swaying together in ecstasy, and floating away into a gray dreamland of delight. It was the same tune, with quaint, syncopated variations, that the budding twigs and the brown pasture grasses had given forth, but more sprightly and with a bell-like tinkle more clear and fresh than any other sound that can be made, this tintinnabulation of falling globules ringing against their kindred water.

Every drop danced into the air again on striking and in the mellow glow of an obscure twilight I could see the surface stippled with pearly light. Then through it all came a new song; the first soloist of the night, the first of his kind of the season, thrilling a long, dreamy, heart-stirring cadenza of happiness, the love call of the swamp tree frog.

With this passage, Packard traces the liminal world of winter becoming spring, as experienced at Ponkapoag Bog in Blue Hills State Reservation on the southern edge of Boston. What I find entrancing in this passage, and much of his work is his ability to blend fairly accurate natural history with an air of mystery, of faerie even. There is an old magic that haunts the edges of Packard’s woodland wanderings. Yes, there are frogs calling — but maybe, too, they are wood sprites humming an ancient melody. In that magical landscape, Packard shares about how he “could feel the happiness of the pasture shrubs.” Raindrops do not merely fall from clouds — they dance and sparkle and tap upon the leaves. This is a much more animate (and animated) vision of nature than many more scientifically inclined nature writers might suggest. He evokes wonder by entertaining just enough doubt about his experiences that he leaves a space for ancient magic to dwell and take root. For example, he writes about his time silently watching the goings-on in a bog that “As I sat quiet, hour after hour, in this miniature wilderness, I came to hear many a strange and unclassified sound that, for all I know, may have been fay or frog, banshee or bird.” Like an impressionist painter, Packard engages with the wetland not only with the objective gaze of scientist, but also with the soul of a poet and mythologist. The result is a world in which frog and fae commingle as one. It is a world, too, of the imaginative experiences of my own childhood. I recall walking through the woods behind my house and imagining all sorts of other worlds, from a path through Mirkwood in Middle Earth to a swamp at the time of the dinosaurs. Where a sapling was bent over by an ice storm, there would be a portal into another place, another landscape of my own creation, fecund with possibility.

This volume is one of four chronicling the seasons in Packard’s corner of Massachusetts. Taken together, their titles are “Woodland Paths” (spring); “Wild Pastures” (summer); “Wood Wanderings” (autumn); and “Wildwood Ways” (winter). This is the third volume I have obtained and chronicled in this blog. “Wood Wanderings has remained unobtainable in its original form; I have settled for a Kindle edition that I will read someday. I do have to say that Packard managed to choose four titles that are practically impossible to keep straight. And on Thriftbooks, where reprints of “Wood Wanderings” are sometimes sold, “0 people are interested in this title.”

Few people, too, appear interested in Winthrop Packard himself. He has no Wikipedia entry. The “Lit2Go” website provides his birth and death dates (1862 and 1943, respectively) and tersely sums him up in two sentences. The first claims that “Winthrop Packard is best known for his novels of the nature genre.” This is patently untrue; his books contain nature essays; they are most definitely not novels. The second sentence merely lists several titles he wrote. Fortunately, Praweb.com offers a slightly more extensive overview of his life. You can read more about Packard in my earlier blog post on his “Wild Pastures”.

Beautiful Mysteries: “Eye Spy: Afield With Nature Among Flowers and Animate Things” by William Hamilton Gibson (1897)

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Aug 272022
 

…A few more similar expositions of the beautiful mysteries of the common flowers which we meet every day in our walks, and which we claim to “know” so well, may serve to add something to the interest of our strolls afield. It is scarcely fair to assert that familiarity can breed contempt in our relations to so lovely an object as a flower, but certain it is that this everyday contact or association, especially with the wild things of the wood, meadow, and wayside, is conducive to an apathy which dulls our sense to their actual attributes of beauty. Many of these commonplace familiars of the copse and thicket and field are indeed like voices in the wilderness to most of us. We forget that the “weed” of one country often becomes a horticultural prize in another, even as the mullein, for which it is hard for the average American to get up any enthusiasm, and which is tolerated with us only in a worthless sheep pasture, flourishes in distinction in many an English or Continental garden as the “American velvet plant.”

James A. Garfield

Try as I may, I cannot shake the parallels from my mind. Every time I bring William Hamilton Gibson (1850-1896) into my thoughts, inevitably I also think of James Abram Garfield (1831-1881), 20th President of the United States. Both have three names (though Garfield’s middle name is usually abbreviated to A.); both have last names of two syllables, beginning with G; both were of roughly the same era; both were quite gifted — Garfield in politics, Gibson in art and writing; both sported similar beards; and both died tragically at a young age (well, younger than I am, a least). James A. Garfield fell to an assassin’s bullet just a few months into his Presidency; William H. Gibson died of a stroke from overwork just a few months before Eye Spy was published. Of the two, I think Gibson was likely the more light-hearted and playful; Garfield looks fairly serious in this photo. I greatly admire Garfield, but since this is a nature blog (and since Candace Millard already crafted a fabulous biography of him), I will focus solely on Gibson in this post, despite my innate need to associate them somehow.

Gibson was a gifted artist who closely observed the world around him — particularly what lay at his feet, in the form of both flowers and the insects associated with them. Employing the two skills in tandem, Gibson reveals in Eye Spy many mysteries pertaining to everyday nature in rural New England, where his studio was situated. “The beauty of the commonplace often requires the aid of the artist as its interpreter,” he remarks in an early essay in this volume. He then proceeds to share with readers, using careful drawings, how the lowly figwort (“a tall, spindling weed”) orchestrates visits by the tiny wasp that pollinates it. He reveals how “these queer little homely flowers” function as “mere devices — first, to insure the visit of an insect, and second, to make that insect the bearer of the pollen from one blossom to the stigma of another.”

I will not bother with the complexities of the process here, but you can read all about this sequence of images in Gibson’s essay, “A Homely Weed”.

One particularly noteworthy feature of this book is that, in keeping with Darwin’s evolutionary theory, Gibson examines flowers and insects together, in light of the “‘new botany’, which recognizes the insect as an important affinity of the flower–the key to its various puzzling features of color, form, and fragrance…” Gibson, though, goes beyond Darwin to imbue these relationships with spiritual significance, reflecting “the conscious intention of the flower as an embodiment of a divine companion to an insect.” Remarking on how botany has been transformed by Darwin’s work, Gibson exclaims in “Riddles in Flowers”: “What puzzles to the mere botanist! for it is because these eminent scholars were mere botanists—students and chroniclers of the structural facts of flowers—that this revelation of the truth about these blossom features was withheld from them. It was not until they had become philosophers and true seers, not until they sought the divine significance, the reason, which lay behind or beneath these facts, that the flowers disclosed their mysteries to them.”

Gibson’s volume (culled largely from previously-published essays) is a book full of magic and mystery, equally inviting to older children and adults. Some chapters focus on the mysteries of pollination, others on predation and parasitism. In one essay, a “mischief-making midge” lays an egg inside a stem or leaf, producing a gall. Three of Gibson’s accounts have a dimension of tragedy — parasitic wasps laying eggs inside caterpillars, cicadas, and grasshoppers, leading to their slow, inevitable death. Others exude joy and delight; in “The Dandelion Burglar”, a dandelion falls victim, not to an insect, but to a redstart thief — a “tiny, black bird with a rosy band in his tail” who steals the developing seeds of a recently-bloomed dandelion to line its nest. Yet other essays reveal to readers how to take spore prints from a mushroom, and how to increase the likelihood of finding multiple four-leaf clovers. My favorite essay in the book reports on the engineering feats of spiders, building bridges very much in keeping with the feats of human engineering. It is entitled “The Spider’s Span”, and I include it in its entirety below.

Observers who witnessed from day to day the construction of the great Brooklyn Bridge were often heard to remark, as they looked up with awe from the ferryboats beneath at the workmen suspended everywhere among the net-work of cables, “Those men look just like spiders in a web.” The comparison seemed irresistible, and the writer heard it expressed many times. But how few who gave utterance to the sentiment realized the full significance of the “spider” allusion, or for a moment reflected that the span itself was, in many particulars of its construction, but a parallel of an engineering feat of which the spider was the earliest discoverer. Yet among all the distinguished names engraved upon the memorial tablet upon the stone bridge-tower the spider gets no credit.

Day after day and week after week we might have seen, travelling back and forth against the sky, a wheel-shaped messenger reeling off its tiny wire. Night and day it was busy, each trip adding one more strand to the growing cable which was to support the great substructure below. And what was this travelling wheel called? “ The carrier,” or “traveller,” if I remember rightly. Why this obviously intentional slight and discourtesy when every field and wood and copse in the country—indeed, on the globe—showed its living example, and bore its myriadfold witness that the “spider” was the only legitimate and proper designation?

In the other most notable suspension-bridge, at Niagara, the time-honored methods of the spider were further and conspicuously recognized, but here again without any courteous engraven acknowledgment on the tablet of fame, so far as I have learned.

A kite was flown from the American shore, and reeled out so as to fall upon the Canadian side, and this initial strand was drawn across, and subsequently strengthened by the travelling reel. The ends of the added wires were firmly secured at their anchorage, and the completed cable at length re-enforced by guy-ropes.

What is the method of our spider? Ages before the advent of the human engineer he followed the same tactics which we now see him performing in every meadow, or even at our window-sill, or on the bouquet upon our table, linking flower with flower, window-sill with garden fence, bush with bush, tree with tree, with his glistening suspension-bridge spanning the stream, river, and meadow. This wiry thread that tightens across our face as we ride in our carriage, and leaves its tingling “snap” upon our nose, what is this but the model suspension cable of Arachne strengthened a hundredfold by the spider which has travelled back and forth over its course for hours perhaps, each trip leaving a fresh strand, one extremity being anchored on yonder oak in the meadow and the other on the church steeple? Such a cable twenty feet in length is a common challenge in our walks in the open wood road, even making a perceptible motion among the leaves and bending twigs on either side ere it yields to our advance. And to the walker who cares to investigate, a silken bridge a hundred feet in length is not a very exceptional find.

This bridge-building is not confined to any particular month or season, nor to any one species of spider. The autumn will afford us the best opportunity for observation. At that season the spider-egg tufts are turning out their baby spiders by the millions, each a perfect grown spider in miniature, and apparently as skilled at birth in the peculiar arts of its kind as its parents were in their ripe old age. Here is a troop of them upon this drooping branch of wild grape by the river brink. Its leaves are glistening in the loose, rambling tangle which marks their wanderings. They are evidently not satisfied with their present surroundings, and would seem desirous of getting as far as possible from the neighborhood of their cradle and swaddling-clothes. They are the most independent and self-reliant babies on record. They ask advice from no one—indeed their mother died a year ago, perhaps—but each determines to leave his brothers and sisters, to “see the world” for himself, and paddle his own canoe.

Fancy a first trial trip on a tight-rope from the torch of the Statue of Liberty to Governors Island! Yet such is the corresponding feat accomplished by this self-reliant acrobat, which a few days or perhaps hours ago was but an egg!

Here is one family of spiderlings upon the grapevine spray, for instance. They are hanging several yards above the water, and with an ocean, as it were, between them and the distant country upon which their hearts are set. But there is no hesitation or misgiving. Let us closely observe this eager youngster far out upon the point of the leaf. The breeze is blowing across the brook. In an instant, upon reaching the edge of the leaf, the spiderling has thrown up the tip of its body, and a tiny, glistening stream is seen to pour out from its group of spinnerets. Farther and farther it floats, waving across the water like a pennant. Two, three, five, ten, fifteen feet are now seen glistening in the sun. Now it floats in among the herbage upon the opposite bank, and seems reaching out for a foothold. In a minute more its tip has brushed against a tall group of asters, and clings fast, the loose span sagging in the breeze, and as we turn our attention to the spider, we see that he has turned about, and is now “hauling in the slack,” which he continues to do until the span is taut, when he anchors it firmly to the leaf, and without a moment’s ceremony steps out upon his tight-rope, and makes the “trial trip” across the abyss —a feat which Dr. McCook, the spider specialist and historian, has most felicitously compared to the similar trial trip of Engineer Farrington across the cable of the East River Bridge, a thrilling event which was witnessed by thousands of spectators from sailing craft and housetops.

Our spider has now reached the asters twenty feet away, and is doubtless busying himself by further securing the anchorage at this terminus. It is quickly done, for see, he is even now far out over the water on his return trip, arriving at the grape leaf a moment later. His strand is now three times as strong as at first, and will be many times stronger before he is satisfied with it. An hour later, if we care to go up-stream half a mile to the bridge, or half a mile below to the crossing pole, for the sake of examining those asters across the brook, we shall find our spiderling nicely settled in a tiny little home of his own. The glistening span is now like a tough silken thread, and is moored to the head of flowers by a half-dozen guy-threads in all directions, while in their midst, in the “nave of his tiny wheel of lace,” our smart young baby rests from his labors.

Such is the probable course which he would follow, unless, perhaps, his roving spirit, thus tempted, has further asserted itself, and not content with this exploit, he has concluded to span the clouds, and is even now sailing a thousand feet aloft in his “ balloon.”

As a bridge-builder he has had many successful imitators, but as a balloonist he is yet more than a match for his bigger copyist, Homo sapiens, as I shall explain in a subsequent paper [enitled “Ballooning Spiders”].

To Interpret Nature: “Wake-Robin” by John Burroughs (1871)

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Jul 092022
 
Wake-Robin Trillium, Smoky Mountains (Wikimedia Commons)
John Burroughts at His Study Door

The literary naturalist does not take liberties with facts; facts are the flora upon which he lives. The more and the fresher the facts the better. I can do nothing without them, but I must give them my own flavor. I must impart to them a quality which heightens and intensifies them.

To interpret Nature is not to improve upon her: it is to draw her out; it is to have an emotional intercourse with her, absorb her, and reproduce her tinged with the colors of the spirit.

Thus states John Burroughs (1837-1921) in the introduction to his first nature book, Wake-Robin. Presented as “mainly a book about the Birds,” Burroughs actually took his title from the local flora, with a name evoking the birds but also suggesting a broader view of the natural world. Ironically, given his statement about not taking liberties with facts, in this case, John Burroughs was in error; he defines wake-robin as “the common name of the white Trillium, which blooms in all our woods, and which marks the arrival of all the birds.” However, as shown above, the wake-robin trillium is actually dark red, with a nodding flowerhead. Here I would grant Burroughs some slack; the book was actually written far away from his native New York State, while he was working as a clerk in Washington, D.C. In the introduction, he described his writing place: “I was the keeper of a vault in which many millions of bank-notes were stored. During my long periods of leisure I took refuge in my pen. How my mind reacted from the iron wall in front of me, and sought solace in memories of all the birds and of summer fields and woods!” I am confident I could not compose essays so evocative of the natural world of these while facing a bank vault door hundreds of miles away.

Why am I back reading Burroughs? After all, he is the second most well-known nature writer of his day (admittedly, a fairly distant second) after John Muir. Many of his books are still in print, and an annual nature-writing medal bears his name. However, the more I delve into the nature-writing world of the 1860s through the 1920s (after which it virtually disappears for a couple of decades), the more I come to realize that Burroughs was its High Priest. His name is the one most mentioned by other nature writers, either well-known in their day or utterly obscure then and now. He set the tone for the time; to understand many of the nature books that followed and the Nature Movement (as Dallas Lore Sharpe calls it) of which they were a part, it is vital to come to grips with Burroughs, including his style, subject matter, and outlook. A few essays will not suffice. I have invested (money and time) in getting to know him well, through all twenty-three volumes of his Collected Works, published three years after his death in the “Wake-Robin Edition”. I was fortunate enough to locate a copy of the set in excellent condition for a third of the price (converted to 2022 dollars) that the set would have cost new. In one volume, I noticed a few pencil marks; otherwise, there is no writing in any of the volumes, no sign of ownership whatsoever. The bindings are tight, the covers undamaged. The pages are a bit tanned, but still of a paper quality sufficient to have deckled sides and a gilt top edge. The cover is supposedly a very dark green, though closer to black. On my bookshelf, the volumes comprise a two-foot dark wall awaiting me. I suspect it will be many years before I reach its end.

Meanwhile, from time to time, I will pull the next volume down from the shelf and saunter through it. It will help keep me reminded of Burroughs’ centrality to nature-writing between shortly after the passing of Thoreau and his own death in 1921. Why he played such a leading role in the Nature Movement is a question that will take much pondering to answer; however, I will sketch out an initial explanation in my next blog post. In this first volume of his work, I encounter a young(ish) John Burroughs in his mid-thirties. According to the dates at the ends of each essay in the book, though, its contents date from 1863 through 1869, when he was in his 20s. In keeping with the day, Burroughs included in his outdoor experiences both hunting and fishing. It was perfectly reasonable to shoot a bird in order to identify it or to describe a trout that had been caught and eaten. At times it is tempting to be deeply troubled by this; then I recall that I am at the beginning of Burroughs’ 50-year journey as a writer, during which his outlook toward nature certainly changed.

The essays in this volume can be dispatched in relatively short order. His opening salvos in the nature field definitely emphasize birds; as he notes in the preface, he wishes the book to be “an invitation to the study of Ornithology.” As such, it is one I must turn down. Most of the essays are highly bird-centric, with the notable exception of “Birch Browsings”, a whimsical account of a nature excursion (with the aim of trout fishing) that Burroughs undertook with some friends. The trip was mostly a disaster, since the fishing party was unable to figure out the directions to the lake, and ended up somewhat lost in the woods with practically no food. Along the way, Burroughs describes some of the flora and fauna. The essay is a delightful mix of story and nature experience and is frequently anthologized.

Throughout the essays, I paid close attention to any name-dropping, seeking to identify Burroughs’ early influences. He mentioned Thoreau repeatedly, and Wilson Flagg once. He quoted Wordsworth but did not mention Emerson. In the more strictly ornithological realm, he mentioned John James Audubon, Thomas Nuttall, and Alexander Wilson; twice he referred to a “Dr. Brewer”. I was surprised to locate Thomas Mayo Brewer (1814-1880) right away using Google.

Those looking for early glimmers of a conservation outlook will not find them here. In fact, in his very first essay, “The Return of the Birds,” Burroughs argues that human civilization has been highly beneficial to many American bird species. Many songbirds, he suggested, are more abundant and sing more now that they have meadows and forests created by European settlers clearing the forest. (The recognition that Native American peoples intentionally cleared forest areas using fire long before the arrival of the Mayflower would have to wait on William Cronon 132 years later.) Here is Burroughs’ argument, in full:

Yet, notwithstanding that birds have come to look upon man as their natural enemy, there can be little doubt that civilization is on the whole favorable to their increase and perpetuity, especially to the smaller species. With man come flies and moths, and insects of all kinds in greater abundance; new plants and weeds are introduced, and, with the clearing up of the country, are sowed broadcast over the land.

As noted earlier in this post, this is a snapshot of John Burroughs in his early days as a writer; I am eager to see how his views may change across half a century of his work. It is unlikely that he realized when he first issued his invitation to others to get out into nature and study the birds that he was at the inception of a Nature Movement that would span the rest of his life, and in which he would take considerable part.

Sitting at the Feet of Nature: “Prose Pastorals” by Herbert Milton Sylvester (1887)

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Jul 022022
 
The Emerald Pool by Albert Bierstadt (1870)

A half-hour’s climb ends at the well-worn path that follows the steep descent to the edge of Emerald Pool, made famous by its portrait by Bierstadt… At first glance at the liquid emerald below, one’s inclination is to sit down upon the rude plank seat upheld between two huge spruces growing just above the Pool, so restful and so full of repose is this charming nook. It is a place above all others in which to dream and drowse. Strange fancies flit through the brain, and the world is forgotten. I am sitting at the feet of Nature, spellbound by the magic of her subtle influences. Above is the dark silhouette of the treetops against the sky, and below is a circular sheet of water, less than a hundred feet in diameter, unsurpassed in its natural beauty by any woodland pool I have ever seen, and so translucent as to reflect the minutest object above it. It is an emerald cup brimful of liquid amber. At its head, massive buttresses of granite stretch almost across the stream, to stay the torrent of the Peabody but a moment, that with tumultuous roar pushes through the narrow flume of these rocks out into the basin of deep, calm water, leaving a track white as the snow of winter. A few feet below the commotion of the cascade, the boiling, seething current is soon lost in faint and ever-widening ripples, tinged with every shade of green from dark to light, — to almost the paleness of sherry as they reach out toward the shallows at its lower edge, where they again escape in wild, broken leaps over the mountain roadway, paved with immense boulders, into the valley. An old gnarled wide-limbed canoe birch, dirty-white, spotted with blotches of sienna and umber, leans far out over the Pool, every limb and tiny twig of which is reproduced in reverse upon or within its polished surface, while around its ragged margin the tall shapely spruces keep stately watch over this jewel of the mountain, most beautiful when the sun pours down its strong vertical light, when the waters become transparent like crystal, and that are like a huge palette strown with rare colors of sky and wood.

Herbert Milton Sylvester (1849-1923) was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, where his father held a management position of some kind in a cotton mill. When Sylvester was 10, his father related to a farm in Maine for his health. Sylvester spent the rest of his childhood there and at Bridgton Academy, a boarding school in rural Maine. After college (location unknown), he went into legal practice, serving in Portland for 13 years before relocating to Boston. While living there, he wrote Prose Pastorals (1887) and Homestead Highways (1888). True to its title, Prose Pastorals is a series of poetic vignettes, mostly reminiscences of Sylvester’s rural childhood in Maine. While not strictly nature writing (farm life figures prominently in some passages), the presence of Nature is woven throughout and is never far from the farmhouse door. “All out-of-door life is filled with poetry and charm,” he announces at one point early in the book. While he finds abundant nature in the farm fields, “It is in the woods,” he observes, “that I find the most perfect repose in nature.”

As a writer, he is perhaps a shade or two shy of profound, and some of his word images, in the style of the times, can be a bit flowery. His poetry, which infuses the book, is solid if some of the rhymes are a tad forced. It is easy to take him as a wealthy city dweller longing for the peace and quiet of his long-lost country life, and that sentiment is present here. Another theme running through the work is his spirituality, heavily influenced by Emerson’s concept of the Over-soul, the transcendent unity of nature of which we are all part. “The lover of Nature,” Sylvester declares,

must, of a truth, be a worshipper at God’s altars. Touch a single key of the piano, and the harp which stands beside will respond with perfect sympathy, but only that string of the harp which accords with that note of the piano will answer with its vibration. Men who are in sympathy with the great Tone constantly sounding throughout Nature will find their hearts unconsciously thrilled with a willing unison of purpose and desire, unconsciously answering its subtle harmonies, unconsciously obedient to the Infinite Hand which has so wonderfully laid the foundations of the grand cathedrals of the woods and mountains. The woods are filled with hosts of unseen worshippers, the mountains with countless altars whose smokes of incense are the white morning mists which lie so lightly along the tree-tops, hiding the battlements of gray, turretted stone and filling the skies with fleecy clouds. The leaping waters that jar the firmly-set rocks the feet of the ever-rising domes, with their tummult and deep reverberations, make the heavy diapson to which all other sounds are attuned. Nature’s grand melodies are ever pitched upon the same key-note. Nature knows no discord. From ocean depth and roar of breaking surf to the light treble of the shallows of the mountain brooklet the harmony is sustained and its rendering is faultless. God sounds the key-note in many a subtle touch of color, tone, and form, animate and inanimate, and wherever he finds a responsive heart there he finds a willing worshipper.

What rescues Sylvester, in my eyes, at least, is that there is another thread running through many of these pastoral pieces. He does not merely celebrate grand vistas and dramatic weather. He also bends down to the ground to explore the myriad invertebrates lurking in the forest leaf litter. He describes ant behaviors from close observations, and frequently mentions (and quotes) John Burroughs. Even Charles Darwin is mentioned a couple of times. He may find “poetry and charm” in nature, but what he notices also piques his curiosity and wonder:

Bird-life and insect-life are full of interest and fascination, and they tell charming stories of intellect and intelligence; and their movements are full of constant surprises, even to those who know them best. The big-bodied humblebee of the fields and meadows, his coat slashed with gold and black velvet, with pollen-covered wings, probing the pink-hewed tubes of the field-clover for their nectar, while the wind sways both bee and clover blossom to and fro like a child in a swing; the ant-carpenter sawing away diligently at a twig or leaf, making lumber for the building and finishing of his house; the gray field-spider setting his filmy trap for a dinner or a breakfast, or else dragging his prey into his funnel-shaped den to sup upon at his leisure, are all abundant in attractions, and are but two or three of the hosts of magicians who make the study of Nature so charming.

Humbled by the complexity of Nature, Sylvester embraces its study as a lifelong endeavor: “How much there is to see in these tramping-grounds of Nature, and how much there is to learn! The ground is written over in all directions with intelligible signs for men’s deciphering.” The passage quoted here, unfortunately, goes on to identify some of those who might seek to decipher these signs: the bee-hunter, the sportsman, the fox-hunter. Indeed, Sylvester admits to a bit of hunting and fishing; after extolling the magnificence of Emerald Pool, he casts a line into the waters and immediately catches a trout. He also shares his approval of crow-hunting, confessing that he finds no redeeming qualities in crows. But while Sylvester may have been too conventional in his leanings to bemoan disappearing birds or logged forests in his writings, he also appears to have avoided the naturalist’s worst vices of the day — shooting birds as specimens and collecting their eggs and nests. I would like to think that he may have felt some faint conservationist leanings, even if they never seem to arise in this book.

In this closing paragraph, I will share a few reflections on my reading experience. This is the third book I have read in a row (not counting the booklet by Minot) that had uncut pages in it, despite its age. In the other two volumes, I did not come across an uncut page until quite a distance into the work. In this case, though, I made it only 13 pages before the first one. According to a hastily scrawled note inside the front cover, the book was a gift from HRP to LS in July of 1887. Apparently, HRP was not a good judge of the reading material LS preferred. That said, reading the book was a tactile delight. The pages are gilt at the top, deckled at the edge, and constituted of high-quality, laid paper. The volume is covered in plain, dark blue cloth that has a pleasant softness in the hand. My copy is in remarkable condition; I was honored to be its first reader, only 135 years after it was originally published.

Jesus Was a Pantheist: “Walks in New England” by Charles Goodrich Whiting (1903)

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Jun 262022
 

If you happen to search this book by the title on Amazon or any purveyor of used and/or new books, you are likely to encounter quite a few hiking guides to New England. This is not one of them. The author, Charles Goodrich Whiting (1842-1922), lived and worked in the Springfield, Massachusetts area, and clearly spent many hours out-of-doors. Yet while he writes fondly of the natural landscape (particularly its botanical elements), he does not report on any actual walks he has taken. The frontispiece photo shows him taking a break on a hike up Mount Tom; a brief statement about the photographs (in stunning sepia) mentions “constant companions” that I assume accompanied his hikes; but only once does he report on an actual walk. Even then, all we know is that he and several others climbed the south side of Mount Tom one autumn, walking along the ridge and finding 56 wildflower species in bloom (the first BioBlitz?). Otherwise, there is an endless cavalcade of brief essays (few more than four pages) describing seasonal offerings, mostly plants in bloom at a given time. Blended into the volume are many poems, some enchanting (works of Emerson, Whitman, and Longfellow) and others less so (his own). The third ingredient of this book is a pious Christianity that sees the natural world through a highly positive, somewhat transcendental lens. If not obsessed with the question of death, Whiting certainly brings it up frequently, reminding the reader (and himself) over and over that it does not exist. The essays themselves are arranged in an arc of the seasons, from late winter back through to midwinter. Whiting was an editor for the Springfield Republican newspaper, and author of a Sunday column, “The Saunterer.” The essays in Walks in New England were likely compiled from several years’ worth of his columns. As a result, there is a fair bit of repetition; the same wildflower appears in bloom across multiple essays. One essay may speak of particular weather conditions, but the next essay might be from another year altogether. As a work of phenology, it could have been improved, at the minimum, by an indication of the original publication dates of each piece.

Did I mention that my copy of this book, once in the library of C. J. Peacock, had many uncut pages in it? Apparently, I am the first one to have read it from cover to cover in nearly 120 years.

Now that I have thoroughly disparaged the book, I will argue that it is one that bears closer scrutiny: his Christianity would hardly be called conventional, for one. And for another, his outlook on human civilization and its environmental impacts seems far more ecologically aware than I would have suspected in 1903.

“Jesus was a pantheist…he knew no space where God was not,” Whiting declared. And while the gnostic, pantheistic Jesus is recognized in some circles today, it was certainly not the conventional perspective on his nature at the time Whiting lived. There are glimmers of this Jesus in the four gospels of the New Testament; but mostly this is the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas, an early Christian scripture excluded from the New Testament as apocryphal. The 77th verse from that gospel reads, “Jesus said, ‘I am the light that shines upon all things. Indeed, I am all things. Everything comes from me, and everything returns to me. Whenever you split a log or turn over a stone, you can find me there.'” But Whiting’s spirituality does not stop there. Consider these passages from his book:

Let us open our eyes, our ears, our hearts to the great current of life, of which we are but a part, — how small a part or how great we cannot yet imagine…

The universe, from least atom to greatest concourse of atoms, from the simplest sensitiveness to the furthest reaches of man’s soul, is all one living being, of which man no less surely and no more truly than the amoeba is the expression…

All life is one; we are one with tree and shrub and flower, one with squirrel and bird, one even with the sinuous serpent…

On a mountain top dwells the vast Oversoul, and man accepts his place, and is silent…

Although Whiting cannot help but single out a serpent, this one is beneficent, a vital part of creation in which “everything in Nature has its value.” But alas, like Eden, this garden universe in which we exist as part of all that is also has a serpent in the darker sense. Where that evil arises, how harm can come from a part of all that is (a fragment of God?) is unaddressed. But it is there, and it is us. After another lovely passage about the beauty of Nature, Whiting interjects, “So goes on the life of earth, only interfered with by man, who does his worst to ruin and obliterate this constant impulse of life.” A few pages later, in a different essay, Whiting again disrupts a peaceful forest landscape to add social commentary: “…and as one drinks of the cold spring beneath the hemlocks, he partakes of the greatest blessing of Nature, the pure essence of her life, distilled through clouds and suns, and filtered through the channel of the holy earth, where as yet man has not arrived to delete and pollute with his many inventions.” Finally, here is one more passage of condemnation, with the added thought that what we do to nature we do ultimately to ourselves: “As for man, only he introduces a breach in the order of being, and destroys tree and flower and bird without respect to their offices, despoiling himself the worst of all.”

At various points, Whiting identifies several ways that humans have adversely impacted nature. One is deforestation; there are repeated references to “the woodsman’s axe”, and Whiting notes that almost all trees in the region are no older than 30 years. Another is air pollution, “the soft coal smoke that hangs over the valley,” an inevitable by-product of industrialization, and entirely unregulated at the time. The steam railroads, meanwhile, were sparking many fires along their routes. Yet another destructive force is the hunter:

Now all the forest regions would be full of squirrels, rabbits, foxes and others of their kin, — of grouse and woodcock, too, — were it not for the hunters, who almost outnumber the game. The woodland on our western hills abounded in these charming creatures, 40 years ago, but now there are probably more gray squirrels in Springfield streets than there are on Mount Tom or Mount Holyoke. It is probable that city protection may yet be the only means to preserve them.

But the worst of the hunters were those going after birds, mostly for the millinery trade. The result had been not only the decimation of many bird species but an ecological impact too, as Whiting explains:

In the state of Nature all these [insects] are kept in subjection by the birds, but since of late years the birds have been slaughered by wholesale to make women’s hats hideous, the balance is lost, and hence we have plagues of elm beetles, cottony louses, and gypsy and brown-tailed moths. Thousands of varieties of insects have found their proper food on trees from time immemorial, and might continue to do so without reminding us of the Plagues of Egypt, were it not for the women who want birds and feathers of birds on their hats… Why do they proclaim themselves murderers?

Dutch Elm Disease, spread by the elm beetle, arrived in the United States. Could it be that the depredation of birds in the late 19th and early 20th centuries helped enable this beetle to spread the blight more rapidly than otherwise would have been the case? Beyond this intriguing prospect, I have to admit that I am quite impressed by Whiting’s grasp of how food chains work, way back in 1903.

Finally, Whiting also appears to have decried in humanity what we would refer to today as a limited grasp of sustainability.

What has man been given reason for? Apparently, to make a dollar to-day. forgeting that generations are to come after him to whom this dollar will be valueless because long since expended, and whom his destruction of the very sources of life has left us poor indeed…

What the earth is to render, what society is to become, when we are gone, — these things are not sufficiently regarded by the present generation.

Wow. That sounds frightfully like our present situation. It is quite depressing, really. Whiting felt the same way. After a few pages indicting humanity for these crimes against Nature, he announces, “Let us try to escape from these difficult and dispiriting thoughts,” and returns to his descriptions of field and forest scenes. As T.S. Eliot would later observe in Burnt Norton, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

Finally, about C.J. Peacock (not to be confused with J. Alfred Prufrock, also from T.S. Eliot): it turns out that another book from his collection ended up in the holdings of the University of Prince Edward Island, which happens to have established a program called Book Lives. It traces, wherever possible, the life stories of those who originally owned the books. In this case, C.J. Peacock was born in 1834 in Yorkshire, England. He apprenticed to become a draper (a very different “man of the cloth”) but ended up working as a dentist in Scarborough, England. He retired in 1911, but it is not known when he died or how his book made its journey back across the Atlantic Ocean.

The Attentive, Discriminating Rambler: “Short Cuts and By-Paths” by Horace Lunt (1891)

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Jun 222022
 

In 1891, Horace Lunt published what would be the last in a trio of nature books. The first, Across Lots (1888), was previously reviewed in this blog. The middle volume, As the Wild Bee Hums, appears to be available only through online archives. I return to an original volume of his work. In addition to obtaining a glimpse of his nature studies three years later, this process also resulted in online research that turned up a few more fragments of information about his life. More about that anon.

The publisher used the same decorative cover for this volume as is found on Across Lots. One suggestion that Lunt has “come up in the world” a bit as a writer since 1888 is that this volume has several black and white illustrations, most notably the pair of chickadees above. Another difference is that, while much of the book is filled with Lunt’s trademark nature rambles in New England over different seasons of the year, there are also several essays suggesting that Lunt has broadened his connections to other scientists, while also gaining scientific knowledge himself. In various parts of the book, Lunt writes about invertebrate life in ocean tidepools, diverse species of flies, lichens (considered plants at the time), and mosses. In each case, he makes certain to use the appropriate scientific terms; for lichens, those include apothecia, gonidia, thallus, and podetia. Unfortunately, the book’s illustrations are strictly decorative, and for the lichen novice, trying to grasp the nature of lichens without visuals strikes me as well nigh impossible. The same problem, unfortunately, is true of Lunt’s flies, tidepool life, and mosses. Lunt’s self-professed enthusiasm for nature is evident throughout; however, even robust (at times, bordering on eloquent) descriptive text is insufficient to convey many of those natural wonders to his readers.

Lunt’s circle of correspondents and/or writers he has read appears to have expanded considerably over three years. Not surprisingly, he mentions Torrey, Burroughs, Darwin, and Thoreau. But he also mentions a “Mr. Minot” — Henry Davis Minot (1859-1890), a railway magnate and ornithologist with whom we will become better acquainted in a future post. He also mentions George B. Emerson (1797-1881), educator and President of the Boston Society of Natural History as well as the cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson. His work, A Report on the Trees and Shrubs Growing Naturally in the Forests of Massachusetts (1846), has been identified by some scholars as marking the beginning of the American Conservation Movement due to its advocacy of wiser forest management practices. Lunt names a female correspondent, Corinne Hoyt Coleman, living in New Hampshire. Finally, Lunt also refers to a “Robinson”, but his steadfast refusal to offer a first name or other details ensures that person’s enduring anonymity.

Before I close my review of this book, I will share a couple of Lunt’s most noteworthy descriptive passages. This first is from a visit to the seaside in his essay, “By the Sea” (complete with an obligatory military simile):

To Norwood’s bluffs, or the long stretch of sandy beach, I go to study the wonders of the shore in detail, and to obtain a nearer view of the ocean’s wrinkled face. It has character — its face is sterner and more imposing and expressive than the face of an inland sea. It’s voice is “The eternal bass in nature’s anthem,” and its breath has a healthful savoriness, a briny flavor, as refreshing to the scent as the perfume of flowers is to the homeward-bound sea voyager.

The winds play with it till it becomes impatient and beats itself against the rocks. Its plastic lips are wrought into a thousand gnarls and convolutions, as they curl through the fissures and caverns, while its foamy tongues, licking the stony bluffs as they recede, leave behind them many pretty cascades that flow gently down the slopes, till the waters mingle again with the incoming waves.

As there are lulls in the wind on a breezy day, so at intervals, as if exhausted with its fury, the sea by the shore becomes suddenly almost calm. Only gurgling, purling sounds are heard for a minute or two, as the wavelets lap the edges of the rocks. But it is gathering strength for another onslaught. Far out, the seas are running high again. A long procession of them swell up from the waters and roll toward the shore at the rate of four hundred feet in thirty seconds. I watch the leader rising higher and concaving as it comes rapidly on. Its crest undulates and throws up streamers of spray, like the flying hairs on the mane of a galloping horse. Now the climax is reached. The sharp edge bends in graceful curves, tumbles over and breaks with dull, heavy roar, into a long line of foam, that shoots swiftly up the steep, shingly beach; then, as it retreats, rolls back a thousand stones, which, as they strike against each other, make a crackling, rattling sound, like the snapping of musket caps by a regiment of soldiers.

Finally, here are a couple of excerpts from Lunt’s encounter with the moss world in his “Winter Sketches”:

So these modest, unpretentious mosses are humbling fulfilling their mission on the earth. They are continually making new leaves, while the old leaves are converted into rich mld, from which in time will spring up an army of higher plants, with their flourish of trumpets and their flying colors. Here at the foot of a tree is a large clump of moss with finer leaves and the thickly matted stems more delicately spun. If a yard or two of yellowish green plush with long hirsute pile had been carelessly spread out and conformed to the general unevenness of the ground, it could hardly have been distinguished, at a distance, from this beautiful piece of Nature’s weaving. The numerous awl-shaped, strongly curved leaves are arranged only on one side of the stem, as if the heavy winds blowing constantly on them from one direction had bent them, like grass-blades in the meadows. From out this soft, mossy bed has grown a mimic forest of brownish-yellow stems or pedicels on which are attached tiny fruit-cups — cornucopiae, arched or bent over like bows. A month or two ago each one of these fruit-cases was completely sealed by a ring of cells growing between the rim of the orofice and cover, that the vessels might be impervious to the weather during the growth of the spores. As the cases ripened, the cells were ruptured and the covers thus dropped off, and the spores or moss seeds were poured out and sown by the Winter’s wind…

If the attentive, descriminating rambler accepts the invitation which these humble but cheerful plants offer, he will be surprised to know how many species will salute him, and impart to him the various entertaining lessons in moss lore during an ordinary woodland walk. Each kind takes him by the button, as it were, and talks to him privately of its special characters and peculiarities.

I am struggling here with the image of a carefree talking moss plant. I think I may prefer Lunt in his more martial moments.

Since my last blog on Horace Lunt, I learned a bit more about him. He was born in York, Maine, and became an orphan at age five. He and his brother Samuel were raised by their aunt and uncle in Kittery, Maine. Another new tidbit about his life was that he may have had a leg amputated following the Civil War. His interest in nature evidently predated the war. In addition to writing, Lunt also gave public speeches. He was found dead in Essex County, Massachusetts, in May 1911 at the age of 74.

My volume of Short Cuts and By-Paths is neither signed nor stamped.

Weeds and Winters: “The Lay of the Land” by Dallas Lore Sharp (1908)

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Jun 142022
 

Having revisited Bradford Torrey, it seemed only proper (and fair) that I do the same for Dallas Lore Sharp, another fairly renowned (relatively speaking) of the nature essayists of natural history’s golden age. Sharp is probably most known (again, in a relative sense) for his essay, “Turtle Eggs for Agassiz” (in another volume of his, still waiting on the shelf), in which he collects turtle eggs to send to the renowned biologist, Louis Agassiz. While Torrey (and so many others) were actively writing in the 1880s and 1890s, Sharp (1870-1929) was a “late bloomer” who published his first nature book in 1901. As such, he was positioned at the height of the Nature-Study Movement and was able to survey its origins, expression, and impacts on American culture. Indeed, some of his finest essays in The Lay of the Land explore this theme. (Most of the rest of the essays offer themes relating to the various seasons of the year, from “Christmas in the Woods” to “High Noon” (late summer). Although I naturally associate Sharp with Torrey, they are dramatically different as authors. Torrey rambles through the woods and fields, making discoveries along the way; the reader often joins him on his adventures without knowing where he might end up. Sharp has a central theme about which the essay is tightly constructed; though many animals and plants may appear along the way, the central image or idea is never far from view. The prose is composed of refreshingly simple sentences, the kind that would have been to Hemmingway’s liking. There are no thickets of convoluted text here. Each essay has a refreshing clarity that goes down like a dipperful of cool water from a mountain stream. Here, for instance, is Sharp’s closing paragraph from his opening essay, “The Muskrats Are Building”:

The muskrats are building; the last of the migrating geese have gone over; the wild mice have harvested their acorns; the bees have clustered; the woodchucks are asleep; and the sap in the big hickory by the side of the house has crept down out of reach of the fingers of the frost. I will put on the storm-doors and the double windows. Even now the logs are blazing cheerily on the wide, warm hearth.

There is no affectation here, no mystery as to the intended meaning. But there is still plenty of room left for wonder, joy, and poetry. “As I watch the changing seasons…across the changeless years,” Sharp observes in that same essay, “I seem to find a scheme, a plan, a purpose, and there are weeds and winters in it, and it seems divine.” Through observing and celebrating everyday events and phenomena, Sharp finds “something close akin to religion,” that

…is a inspiration, the kind of experience one has in living with the out-of-doors. It doen’t come from books, from laboratories, not even from an occasional tramp afield. It is out of companionship with nature that it comes; not often, perhaps, to any one, nor only to poets who write. I have had such experiences, such moments of quiet insight and uplift, while in the very narrowest of the paths of the woods.

As may already be evident to the reader, Sharp’s vision of nature study combines two elements: biological knowledge (science) and inspiration for the spirit (poetry). Both are essential to engaging meaningfully with the natural world. ” A botanist who is never a poet misses as much in the out-of-doors as a poet who is never botanist.” Elsewhere, Sharp declares that “Nature study is the out-of-door side of natural history, the unmeasured, unprinted side of poetry. It is joy in breathing the air of the fields; joy in seeing, hearing, living the life of the fields; joy in knowing and loving all that lives with you in your out-of-doors. The best nature-study books, therefore, “appeal to sentiment as well as to sense” and are “very unlike the earlier desiccated, unimaginative treatises.”

How does one become a student of nature? The pathway into nature study begins with close observation over time in a particular place. “Let us learn to see and name first. The inexperienced, the unknowing, the unthinking cannot love. One must live until tired, think until baffled, before he can know his need of Nature.”

The first necessity for interesting nature study is an intimate acquaintance with some locality. It does not matter how small, how commonplace, how near the city, — the nearer the better, provided there are trees, water, fences, and some seclusion. If your own roof-tree stands in the midst of it, then that is ideal.

The true nature student is literally at home in nature, cognizant of its many moods and aware of the comings and goings of all the creatures — neighbors — who share that space with him. He observes the daily development of seedlings and flower buds, watches birds building their nests, and notices the muskrats constructing their winter lodges. With close inspection of and engagement with nature over the long years, a beautiful pattern emerges, “and there are weeds and winters in it, and it seems divine.”

My copy of The Lay of the Land is nearly pristine; there are no marks of past ownership. There is a small bookseller stamp on the flyleaf’s lower left. This book was originally sold in Boston, by a company owned and operated by Charles Emelius Lauriat (1842-1920). HIs son (Charles Emelius Lauriat, Jr. — 1874-1937) was among the survivors of the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, seven years after this book was published.

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